It is with tears in our eyes that we allow Judy to leave our side......and return to her studies in NTU (Nanyang Technological University)! Over the past 3 months that Judy has been with us, she has made significant contributions to ShowNearby and her work performance was nothing short of spectacular!

In fact, we were so impressed with her work that we have offered her a place in our company after her studies is complete! She single-handedly did a dynamic wordpress integration for our main site and even developed working prototypes for our mobile applications in her short stint here!

Check out Judy's pressroom family profile page before we take it down and dump place her with all the other past interns! We're sad to see you go, but worry not for you'll always be in our hearts and we'll still be friends for a long time to come (as long as facebook is still around).

As today (30/07/2010) is Judy's last day, she arrived bright and early at office at 0930hrs sharp with her parting gift for us: Famous Amos cookies! See what transpires below...

0930hrs:
Judy with Cookies

0930hrs + 4 secs:
No more Judy

0930hrs + 2 secs later:
Judy with
Cookies snatched from her

After we did the necessary, we can now enjoy the gift!

It's one pack for the whole company of 18 people. According to the Nutritional Facts, theres about 56 cookies in the pack. Which resolves to about 3.1111 cookie per employee. At this point in writing, about half the cookies have been eaten. We shall not name names, but you know who you are De*ek!

To make up for our mean behavior earlier, we took Judy out for ice-cream at Udders!

That's $30 worth of Ice-Cream

Finally, from all of us at ShowNearby, thanks for your support and your help in the past 3 months Judy! We really enjoyed working with you and hope to see you again soon! All the best in your future endeavours.

- The ShowNearby Family

P.S: We're just kidding about the friends on facebook stuff Judy, we can also be friends on Twitter!

UPDATE: In order to avoid physical abuse, the appropriate changes based on Commenter number 1's comments have been made to the above blog post.

We're equal parts excited and honored that TodayOnline did a writeup for us on our achievements thus far!

First off, let us thank the writer Ephraim Seow Siew Lee for making the trip down to our office to do the interview and for writing such a nice story about our history, our recent investment (Global Yellow Pages Invests $3.5m in ShowNearby) and our future roadmap.

Instead of posting the entire article here (do check out the article Show me the money though), we just wanted to extract the gist of it and put it on our blog.

And here it is...

Mugshot of our CEO and Founder!

Seriously though, with this stamp of approval of our previous successes and achievements, we'll like to take this opportunity to reaffirm to our users that we at ShowNearby are dedicated to continue our mission of providing them with useful and relevant location based products across multiple platforms.

We'll also like to say a special thank you to those who have helped us better define our products through their feedbacks and suggestions! Do keep them coming and we promise to continuously innovate and deliver products that change the way we live, work and play!

Lastly, we'll just like to say that the whole company is neither jealous nor annoyed that our CEO, Douglas was the only one who got his picture taken and featured. We're cool with it....no issues whatsoever :)

UPDATE: After reading the above post, Douglas has kindly "requested" that we add this sentence to the post."ShowNearby is only possible because I have a fantastic team, who's relentless pursuit of excellence made it all possible."

-Douglas

Don't worry Doug, all of us at ShowNearby can feel you... (with our hearts of course!)

Introducing our new addition to the ever growing ShowNearby family! Michael has just joined us as a mobile developer. His main tasks involves transferring the success we have had on iPhone and Android onto the Blackberry. And here's a picture of him relaxing on the ezy chair at 2:01pm (i.e. 1 minute after lunch break was over).

.

The reason we hired Michael is because we have also been receiving requests from Blackberry users asking for a similar application on their Blackberry phones after seeing their significant others, friends etc. playing with ShowNearby on their iPhones and Androids (Here's looking at you Scott Harding!).

We still are afraid of spreading our love too thin and going into another relationship with another platform, (read our blog post on Why Android? to understand what we mean. Go on, we'll wait right here...) but at the same time we have to fulfil our company's policy of "Ask and you shall receive" to our users.

Hence, to put our money where our mouth is, we have decided to employ someone dedicated to bring ShowNearby onto the Blackberry!

Unfortunately, we were unable to source for nice new Blackberry phones to test on and expediate the development process. Thus we have to make do with a hand me down courtesy of a kind lady from Yellow Pages....

Fret not, Blackberriers you're in good hands now :) ShowNearby on Blackberry, coming soon to an app store near you!

Welcome onboard Michael!

*Subtle hints:

1. Donation of used (or new) Blackberry phones are welcomed and encouraged...

2. Donation of cash to buy used (or new) Blackberry phones will be graciously accepted.

3. Our Ezy Chair is broken, donations for new furnitures will also be accepted.

Over the past few months, we've had many queries/comments/anger-filled emails from our iPhone users asking us why is it that everytime we release a feature on our mobile application, the Android-ers get it first and why is iPhone always lagging behind.

Well, to be honest, Android is and always will be our first love. We are where we are today thanks in no small part to Android.

As such we had a hard time spreading some of that love to iPhone and to put them both on equal standing in our hearts. But we're trying our best to be less bias and treat both equally! So take no offence iPhoners, we're slowly growing to love another platform.

But iPhoners please understand that we are still a company guided by business objectives (and the ever looming investors watching our every move....) We'll have to develop on a platform that makes business sense. Simply put...

WE NEED MORE USERS ON iPHONE!

Help us spread the word people...Convince/Advice/Force all your friends with iPhones to download ShowNearby and we'll make sure whatever features the Android guys get will be made available to you too!

And who knows, Sherby might start to love fruits more than that cold green robot someday...(Hopefully our Android Master Jose does not read this post!)

Normally we do not advocate gambling. However, the user requests for showing nearby Singapore Pools outlets have been waaaay too overwhelming for us to keep convincing them individually that gambling is bad for health. So well, if you can't convince them. Join them!

And so ladies and gentlemen, if you have a sudden stroke of inspiration, feel lucky and there's a burning desire within you to contribute to Singapore pool's community effort but have no idea where the nearest Singapore Pools outlets is, look no further than your friendly ShowNearby on Android. Simply search for "Singapore Pools" or "Toto" in the search feature and the nearest betting stations will show up for your gambling pleasures!

And here's a picture of our new hire Oliver who served as a beta tester to test the accuracy of our new data of Singapore Pools location! He has found a nearby Singapore Pools outlet to place his bets of $1..courtesy of ShowNearby on his Sony Ericsson x10!

We'll share a little bit of additional information to alleviate some of the guilt of gambling...Did you know that Singapore Pools donates back millions of dollars yearly to charity?

However, users who have been following our blog religiously would probably not have donated to charity very much during the World Cup due to our successful prediction of the winner of World Cup 2010. (Check out our blogpost World Cup is HERE if you don't believe!)

Finally, to that one user who requested for it...The answer is "No, we are not going to ShowNearby illegal bookies!!!!!" Not even if a million users requested for it...

We have received a request from one of our users to update our data for ERP rates (Yes, we're talking about you Jerrold!) in our Android application. To align with our company policy of "Ask and you shall receive", we have decided to schedule a database refresh to get updated rates and include it in our application.

We are trying to work with LTA and some other organizations to refresh that data! (Any help will be greatly appreciated too...)

Don't forget your promise to us about sharing our app with all your friends Jerrold and yes, we promise we'll do our best to stay as an inspiration to all Android developers in Singapore!

It's Lady Gaga recording her latest music video on one of Singapore's fishing kelongs. Bored of the usual shiny disco balls and posh surroundings, her tireless search for outlandish ideas has brought her to the rustic, wooden fishing houses of yesteryear.

Yeah, who are we kidding, that's not Lady Gaga. That's CJ, one of ShowNearby's lead developers.

The ShowNearby team took a quick getaway last weekend to a nearby kelong for some relaxing fishing. Besides hanging out the rods, playing mahjong and taking in the sea breeze, we were also treated to a wonderful seafood dinner at the end.

Hey fishy fishy fishy...

Small?! At least I caught one!

The squid was using its big brain to mind-control us from eating it...

*burp*

The weekend was a blast for us. We certainly look forward to our next trip in the near future!

Here's an email from someone today asking about the compatibility of ShowNearby apps with different mobile platforms:

*Blushing* We are thrilled and honoured that users like yourself want to know which platform works better with ShowNearby before buying your phone! It is you guys who inspire us to wake up everyday to create new and better features for ShowNearby. We would like to thank this ardent user and many of you guys out there for your continuous support!

Oh yes, and to answer the email, we would recommend at least the Android 1.5 and iOS 3.2 for the best experience. :)

It is encouraging to note however, that AEDs are easy to operate and more public areas and offices in Singapore are starting to include these life-saving devices. Just google "One year old using AED" and you can see why everyone including you have the power to save a life.

ShowNearby included a category called "AED" a few months ago in both our Android and iPhone mobile applications. These nearby AED locations are also available as a stand-alone app called ShowNearby AED on Android, with a similar one slated to release on the iPhone soon. As this information is critical in saving lives, we update the locations of new AEDs daily.

With this information, we hope to empower each and everyone of us to save lives.

Thank you for your overwhelming support over the past 2 years. Because of you, we are currently Singapore's leading location-based service.

On mobile, ShowNearby is among the Top 5 location-based applications on both Android and iPhone.

On the web, ShowNearby truly shows you what's nearby and we strive to make more search terms available as we enhance our database.

Starting from a humble SOHO of only 2 people, we have become 16 people strong; with an active mobile user base of over 20,000 per day in Singapore. ShowNearby Mobile continues to attract 600-800 new downloads each day with favourable mentions in mainstream media as well as forums, blogs and review sites.

The 9th July marks an exciting milestone for ShowNearby as we receive a $3.5 million investment from a company whose “Walking Fingers” logo can be recognised in almost every country in the world.

With their global footprint and expertise in directory listings, we are able to bring you the latest and most updated information about your favourite places.

The new investment capital will allow ShowNearby to focus on developing more features to help you find nearby things smarter and easier. We are also going to introduce new tools in the upcoming months to help merchants connect to their customers and unlock the potential of location based services. By integrating Global Yellow Pages’ data and advertisers, we will be able to deliver a richer, more meaningful location-based service; staying true to our mission of answering this simple question - "What's Nearby?"

The last two years have been a blast for us and we hope you will continue to follow us in this adventure to push location-based services to the next level. As always, we thank you all for the feedback and hope you will keep them coming. :)

We are excited to introduce our 2 new and camera-shy family members, Sonny and Wenkai to our ShowNearby team! (We had to beg them for 2 hours before they reluctantly posed for this simple photograph! Then we had to beg them for another 15mins before they managed a weak smile...)

Their fresh ideas and enthusiasm for location-based services will be critical in defining ShowNearby's new product features in the coming months.

In plain english, it means how cool our mobile application will be in the future will depend on these guys! So if there's a cool feature you'll like to see, feel free to drop them an email or bribe them with treats! (Btw, they're still single as far as we know...)